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by James Bowman
In politics as in so much else what you have to say depends on where — and with whom — you have to stand. Everyone has a point of view, and the political process is all about creating constituencies for particular points of view. But the media doesn’t believe in the necessity of these ordinary and universal contingencies. They have their own sort of universalism instead. Because, that is, of their self-conceit as being above what they scornfully call "partisanship," they imagine that there is one point of view that doesn’t come from a particular place on the political spectrum but all points and none. It is, as it were, God’s point of view, sub specie aeternitatis, and they fondly suppose that it is easy to adopt as their own. This is, of course, patently false, but the pretense that it is true lies behind much of what appears in the media, masquerading as news. Take Dana Milbank’s daily dose of snark in today’s column in the Washington Post. His unerring nose for hypocrisy has caught out — who else? — Senate Republicans who used to complain about Democratic obstructionism towards George W. Bush’s judicial appointments and are now engaging in the exact same behavior when it comes to Barack Obama’s judicial appointments. He seems not to notice that this argument works both ways. If the GOP is guilty of hypocrisy, so are the Democrats who formerly obstructed Mr Bush’s nominees and are now complaining about Republican obstruction of Mr Obama’s nominees. Mr Milbank is simply seeing things, as he generally does, from the Democratic point of view, but he imagines he is making a non-partisan and therefore moral point about Republican "hypocrisy." Doubtless there are good arguments for a partisan truce over judges, but we haven’t got such a thing and are unlikely to get it any time soon. Right now it would be in the Democrats’ interest for judicial partisanship to disarm just as once it would have been in the Republicans’ interest. But the Democrats then didn’t want to make peace with the Bush appointments, and the Republicans now don’t want to make peace with the Obama appointments. Nobody wants to go first. Until somebody does, such "hypocrisy" will be a permanent feature of our politics, just as it has been for at least the last decade and, arguably, since the Bork confirmation hearings in 1987. It’s only Dana Milbank’s sense of his own moral superiority — that quality which is becoming the common coin of our political life — that makes this seem like news. His self-righteousness is a paltry thing, however, next to that of Al Gore who is now set — according to the London Daily Telegraph — to become "the world's first carbon billionaire." In other words, as even The New York Times has noticed, Mr Gore is personally profiting, and profiting mightily, from the alarm over global warming that he has so assiduously spreading for lo these many years. Asked about this by Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mr Gore replied: "If you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me." Alas, we know Al only too well. We know him as a man who has never scrupled to use personal and family tragedies for political gain, a man whose criticisms of George W. Bush have not only reeked of sour grapes and been lacking in grace but have revealed a failure to understand the most basic facts about honor and integrity in politics — which, like so much else, depends on an honest acknowledgment of one’s partisanship. "Sincerity," as Holman W. Jenkins Jr. wrote a propos of the former Vice President’s profitable doom-mongering in last week’s Wall Street Journal, "is no substitute for disinterestedness." This is another way of saying that what you have to say is always and inevitably going to depend on where and with whom you have to stand. Not surprisingly, where Mr Gore stands on global warming is with his partners in self-righteousness in the media — that is among those who also stand to gain from spreading alarm about the supposedly imminent peril to the planet. This doesn’t mean that either of them are wrong about that peril, but it does mean that the rest of us are entitled to regard what they say with a healthy dose of skepticism.
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by James Bowman
In olden times, revolutions used to start among the potentially revolutionary classes with the idea that the king or, as it might be, the czar was being ill-served by his advisors. Dangerous and corrupt figures — sometimes nobles, sometimes agents, sometimes royal family members, especially if they were of foreign origin — must have been getting between the monarch and his people, so that the former could not hear what was troubling the latter, and offer redress of their grievances. The assumption, of course, was that the king or czar himself really loved his people and was concerned for their welfare, but that those who were close to him had to have been preventing him from doing the right thing, which he must otherwise want to do as a matter of course. It was only a first phase, as I say. Before long, anger at the king’s men — or women — was likely to spill over into anger at the king himself, who had then to look to his crown. Is it merely fanciful on my part, then, to see the first glimmerings of a revolt against good King Barack among his loyal people, the politically progressive? For, as The Times of London reports today, the resolve of world leaders to take firm action on climate change appears to be weakening, with President Obama confirming that there would be no legally binding deal at the UN summit in Copenhagen next month." Instead of being an epoch-making event, Copenhagen is now being downgraded to "merely a ‘staging post’ towards a global deal on climate change" — that is, to say, yet another such staging post, just like Rio and Kyoto and Barcelona and, well, every other climate change summit. What? Is it possible? How can it be that the latest round of talks will once again produce no serious action? Who, ask the vassals, is to blame? Well, The New York Times has a candidate. I mean besides George W. Bush, who gets a dishonorable mention in today’s paper, as you might expect. But as the progressives don’t have Bush to kick around anymore — not that that necessarily stops them from trying — the article’s author, John M. Broder, suggests another possibility, namely that the President is ill-served by his congressional allies in the natural and inevitable desire he himself must have to take decisive action against global warming. "Mr. Obama has been a champion of climate change regulation," writes Mr Broder, and yet he "has found himself limited in his ambitions by a Congress that is unwilling to move as far or as fast as he would like."
Fortunately for the world, we learn that "Mr. Obama’s aides say he remains determined to use his domestic authority and international clout to continue pressing toward a global agreement. despite the latest setback." Hooray for the king! But do you think that, when there is still no agreement in a year or two or three, say by the time that Mr Obama is running for re-election in 2012, the media and other forces for progressivism will begin to get the idea that the king himself is to blame? I doubt it myself. The idea of holding worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to half their 1990 levels by 2050, which is the latest goal — without which apocalypse must be supposed to follow — of the global warmists, is and always has been political fantasy. There’s a reason why the Kyoto Treaty was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 95-0. Such a draconian measure — much less draconian than the latest proposals — would be economic and political suicide. But if it is a fantasy, it is a fantasy that the progressives and King Barack alike have learned to cling to. Such fantasies — like the beneficial effects of the stimulus or the fiscal responsibility of health care legislation — are the basis on which this administration is founded. The President is not only highly skilled at reinforcing and playing to these fantasies, he was the progressive candidate in last year’s election for that very reason. Congress may have to pay the price first when fantasy collides with reality, but it’s still hard to believe that Mr Obama will, at least among progressives.
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Has any novelist been as gifted with so many earnest critics trying to rehabilitate his terminal talent and grant him the benefit of every artistic doubt than Philip Roth? For a man obsessed with a loss of ability—sexual, literary and otherwise—his greatest insight into the ravages of old age seems to be his self-exampled imperviousness to being called out for pap. A characteristic case of this indulgence is Judith Shulevitz’s all-too-kind review of The Humbling, Roth’s latest installment in what he’s labeled a “quartet” of nocturne emissions. Should we consider it a sign of courage in a critic who, by novel’s end, is not able to decipher if what she’s just read is an unholy mess or not? And if it's self-travesty, as Simon asks himself, "how had it happened? Was it purely the passage of time bringing on decay and collapse? Was it a surprising manifestation of aging?" We never really find out why Simon lost his magic. I consider it proof of Roth's courage—of his will to experiment, no matter when or with what—that by the end of the The Humbling we can't tell whether he has lost his.
Pegeen is a lesbian waif with a bad haircut and a 16-year-old boy's taste in clothes, albeit also a professor of environmental science, and, improbably, she becomes Simon's lover. Simon buys her expensive outfits and gets her hair expensively styled, making her over as a viable heterosexual. He regains some of his lost vitality. He even dreams of having children with her. Very quickly, however, the affair turns ugly. Pegeen sleeps with two young softball players with bobbing blond ponytails. A green dildo comes out of a bag. A threesome is arranged. Simon is too weak to stop the downward lurch, and Pegeen, who appeared so innocent, begins to seem demonic. “Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!”—“we will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”… It is just with such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock.
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Where are the Purple Hearts? Some Truths About Fort Hood by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Twelve solders and one civilian army employee were massacred by Maj. Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, on November 5 at Ft. Hood, Texas. Maj. Hasan injured another thirty people, some critically, before being shot himself by the local police. Will the soldiers whom Hasan killed or injured in this latest terrorist assault receive the Purple Heart? In [...]
It takes a certain type of personality to spend a cold Moscow night alone with Anna Akhmatova in a state of total chastity and reserve. Then again, Isaiah Berlin saved all the good dirt for his own scholarly reputation, which, despite the best revisionist efforts, was quite middling and saved from the enormous condescension of posterity only by the rhetorical pyrotechnics and parlor charm of its holder. That extremely talented profile artist, Evan Goldstein, does his best to show the “no, wait!” side of this long-running dispute as to Berlin’s intellectual talents in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A few shrewd insights into Zionism and a handy guide to Russian humanists, perhaps? (In my opinion, his best essay was on Marx and Disraeli, the pole stars of 19th century “exception” Jews.) But apart from a useful apothegm about foxes and hedgehogs, which belonged to the Greek poet Archilochus, and a less useful dichotomy between “negative” and “positive” liberties, which located the happy political middle-ground as being somewhere between Ayn Rand and Stalin, what has Berlin left us except for so many friends, so many letters and so many admirable summaries of what greater men have thought and done?
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Strengthening the Special Relationship by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
There are two planks to Obama’s foreign policy. One is the presumption that America is in the wrong. Hence Obama’s habit, as he travels around the world, of apologizing for America. The whole idea of “American exceptionalism,” he has explained, is wrong. If America is “exceptional,” it is only in the sense that every [...] by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Every phone call. Every email. Every text message. Every web site visited. I land at Heathrow and discover that Big Brother in England will be recording it all: the entire electronic career of every private citizen will salted away for a year in a gigantic database and “available for monitoring by government bodies.” Six-hundred [...] by James Bowman
A few days ago, there appeared in the London Daily Telegraph an article by Jeff Randall that fell into the class of journalistic screed that the British call the "Why-oh-why?" article. Mr Randall had, along with many others in the British media, seized upon the much publicized arrest of a drunken student for urinating upon some memorial poppies, ubiquitous in Britain at this time of year, as a reason for thinking that modern Britain itself can be characterized by, in the words of the article’s headline, "No respect, no morals, no trust." It wasn’t, thought Mr Randall, just the failure of reverence for the glorious dead, but a more general sort of disrespect that shows up even in the propensity of demoralized Britons to litter.
And he goes on to a fairly routine tour d’horizon of media horror stories about "an all-embracing culture of grievance" criminals who "have learnt to claim victim status" dishonest bankers and members of parliament for whom "freedom means pursuing that with which it is possible to get away." He recalls Tony Blair’s exemplary declaration a few years ago that "a decent society is not based on rights. It is based on duty… the duty to show respect," but "after 12 years of his New Labour project, the respect to which Mr Blair referred is in the sewer."
Generally speaking, I am as keen as the next man on the "Why-oh-why?" brand of conservatism and can only applaud when the Americanized Briton, John Derbyshire produces, as he has just done, a book titled: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Crown Forum, 272 pp. $26). Doubtless, too, pessimism is all the more attractive to the middle aged and older when it is, like Mr Randall’s, pessimism about the young. But I always have the feeling about the why-oh-whys that they are a "why" short. They never seem to get to the point of discovering that the real "why" is that this is the way we want it; this is the way we have designed and built our world since the demise of the honor culture, and it is a necessary corollary of the therapeutic one that has succeeded it. Take the case of the teacher and the yobbish parents mentioned by Mr Randall above. He is referring here, I assume, to a story that had appeared in the Telegraph a couple of weeks before about a father, Tim Walton, who was said to have taken the side of his 15-year-old son, Daniel, after the latter had allegedly been "excluded" from Macclesfield High School in Cheshire for refusing to stand up out of respect for his headmaster. "I teach my kids respect is earned," said Walton, p re. The headmaster, he added, "hasn’t been there long enough to earn my son’s respect so why should he stand up for him?" Where does such a crazy idea as this come from, I wonder? Why, from the collapse of any system of honor by which parents and children alike might have understood why respect had to be earned by pupils but can only be lost by teachers. This was once the culture of all of us, and we quite deliberately trashed it in the wake of the revolutionary 1960s. Now it would take a similar effort of all of us to get it back, and I see no sign of such an effort in the offing. That’s the melancholy answer to why-oh-why? We have made our bed and we must now lie in it.
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by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Today, November 9, 2009, marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looking back, it is difficult not to feel a celebratory thrill: if the Berlin Wall was a sort of objective correlative of Communist tyranny — the perfect architectural summary of its soul-blighting aspirations — its dramatic fall seemed like a [...] by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Yesterday, in the dead of night, the U.S. House of Representatives took a small step for Nancy Pelosi and a giant step for despotism. Freedom, David Hume famously observed, is seldom lost all at once. More often, it leaks out slowly. The petty tyranny of good intentions colludes with the bureaucratic imperative to stymie individual initiative [...] |
About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.
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